In addition to conventional wages, employers may compensate their employees using a variety of methods. Additional compensation and payments to employees may consist of bonuses, awards, reimbursements for incurred expenses, gifts, conference fees, convention fees, prepayment of expenses, or similar items. These additional forms of compensation and payments will be referred to herein as non-wage compensation or additional compensation. Typically, submission, processing and approval of these non-wage compensation requests are handled outside of the normal payroll process. These non-wage compensation requests are typically submitted, verified, validated, approved or disapproved through a process defined by the employer. Many employers use paper forms to request and track these non-wage compensation payments. For instance, a manager initiating an award of a bonus may complete and submit a bonus request form for approval. The completed bonus request form passes through an approval cycle and, when approved, may be sent to payroll for payment. Alternatively, an individual seeking reimbursement for a company related expense may complete and submit an expense reimbursement request which is processed through an approval cycle before payment is authorized. Once payment is authorized in connection with the reimbursement request, the form may be sent to the payroll department for payment. Each of these methods is time consuming, prone to error, and inefficient.
Employers may also allocate specific funds to be used for bonuses, awards, reimbursements, gifts, convention and conference fees, publication awards, or other types of non-wage compensation to their employees. If an employer has allocated funding in this manner, amounts approved for non-wage compensation to employees must be deducted from the allocated amounts in each category. The availability of these funds may also be queried prior to approving such a request. Typically a payroll department oversees these allocated funds.
The problems associated with paying and tracking non-wage compensation to employees is exasperated for multi-site employers. Multi-site employers may allocate financial resources to these expenses to the aforementioned categories or by site. Additionally, maintaining standard request, validation, and approval procedures across sites may be difficult for multi-site employers.
Accordingly, a need exists for a method of and system for processing and paying non-wage compensation requests and payments.